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Best of 2008: Bloodlust

Ideally, this roundup would reflect my efforts to read widely and democratically. But, as happened to so many others this year, most of my reading hours were tragically sucked away by a single genre: the vampire novel.

It began innocently enough, as a sociological experiment. I set out to discover why older (as in fully grown) women had fallen, en masse, under the spell of Stephenie Meyer’s teen-age vampire. I read “Twilight,” then moved on to “New Moon” and “Eclipse.” Three books in, nothing seemed to have happened—I mean that the series seemed to have no plot. The answer became clear only with “Breaking Dawn”: older (fully grown) women who read teen-age vampire novels are insane, I among them.

A brief summary of the fourth book reveals the extent of the madness: Edward, the vampire, who looks like he is seventeen but is actually over a hundred (which makes him a sort of pedophile, but never mind), finally persuades Bella to marry him by promising to have intercourse with her after the ceremony. Despite having built up to the sex scene over the course of the first three books, Meyer declines to describe it. But we know that sex has occurred, because suffering follows fast. Bella becomes pregnant. The fetus is a monster that gestates rapidly and must be fed with human blood. (Bella obligingly chugs cup after cup.) According to myth, the creature will bite its way out of the womb, killing its mother in the process. Edward wants to get rid of it; Bella won’t let him. The fetus thrashes and bites, cracking Bella’s ribs and crushing her spine, paralyzing her. Still she loves it. Edward bites it out of her, turning her into a vampire, and saving the spawn, which they name Renesmee (seriously). Then there are six hundred pages of preparation for a vampire battle, but in the end everyone decides that peace is the way to go.

In the best review I’ve read of the series, the reviewer expresses all our pain when she writes:

I must read them. I don’t even understand it, but I am compelled against my own will to suffer every moment of this agonising stupidity. These books are insidious. There is some kind of evil woven into the fibre of the pages, I think, something that has broken me. I hate this series with the fiery intensity of a chemical weapon, and I can’t. stop. reading. it.

I closed the final book in a state of shock: how many hours had I wasted? And why did it make such little sense? I decided to try to wash away the shame with Charlaine Harris’s “Sookie Stackhouse” series. These have a similar premise to “Twilight”—a young girl falls in love with an ancient, studly vampire—but to Harris it’s all a big joke. She sets the stories in a redneck town in Louisiana, and mortal-on-immortal action provides the backbone of the plot. The books are both infinitely superior to “Twilight,” in terms of style and gender roles, and not nearly as addictive (you can catch the adapted version, “True Blood,” on HBO). After reading two, I was done, and still confused.

At this point, I felt that there was little more I could discover about vampires. Yet I was strangely unsatisfied. What was the point? The answer came, unexpectedly, weeks later, when I picked up a copy of “Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Germany and Beyond,” by Caroline Walker Bynum. At first brush, it seems off-topic, and, indeed, there are no vampires (at least, not in the way we define the term) in Bynum’s study. But a few pages in, it became clear to me that vampire fixation is really blood fixation, which, as Bynum shows, is an infinitely complex subject, stretching back centuries, permeating cultures, invoking myths and rituals, and sparking fierce debates. Bynum explores certain “lurking” assumptions about blood in Western culture— “assumptions that had something to do with the emphasis on blood as drops and globules, shed and separated bits, as well as with an insistence on the redness, liquidness, the being-alive-ness, of that which was poured forth in death.”

If you’re looking for a satisfying read this winter, I’d recommend skipping the monsters and going straight to the source.